


If Machines Could Sing

by BenevolentErrancy



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Birthday, F/F, Fluff, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Memoria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-22
Updated: 2017-12-22
Packaged: 2019-02-18 14:11:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13101834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BenevolentErrancy/pseuds/BenevolentErrancy
Summary: Math, numbers, machines, those had always been there, those had always been constant.  Growing up, nothing else really had been.  But things weren’t like that anymore, and she preferred not to dwell on her time growing up.  She shut it down and locked it up behind firewalls and deleted the directories that lead back there.  It was unnecessary baggage, a glitch in her programming, an obsolete file that slowed her down.  But command_code: “birthday” had a way of drawing those memories back up.  So she kept busy.Unfortunately, so did other people.





	If Machines Could Sing

By now, Maxwell knew the Hephaestus like an old friend.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that if she had old friends, she would know them as well as the Hephaestus.

She sees the blueprints in her head, sees them shift and swim through their three dimensional mapping, the layers of crew pathways and service corridors overlaid with technical graphs of wiring and pipes and carefully labelled systems that blurred over top of each other until she, with barely a thought, dissected them from one another and superimpose them over her surroundings.  She was in engineering, but she wasn’t _just_ in engineering.  To her right she passed a comms terminal, and snaking through that wall was a network that connected it to three other engineering terminals to create a subsystem, partitioned off the main systems for safety reasons.  Immediately beneath her feet were three different branches of the Hephaestus’ heating ducts, and below that was a primary power node.  Overhead, she knew there were four different networks of wires, all carrying different information at impossible speeds all over the ship.  Interspersed through all of this was the grid of cameras and sensors and auditor inputs used by the mother program to supervise the station and its inhabitants.  All of this hidden from sight but effortlessly visible in her  mind’s eye.

With ease she moved  through the stuffy, complex maze of engineering, not even looking up from the tablet in her hand and she pushed her way along.  She was trying to make sense of an error that had cropped up yesterday in the ventilation system.  It had been a strange, brief tick and she might have overlooked it if it weren’t for the fact that it quite literally _should not have happened_.  As far as she could tell there was no trigger that should have set it off, it was a completely inscrutable puzzle, and _that_ annoyed Alana Maxwell.  So here she was, attempting to hunt it down to its root system.

She may have very well continued on her way, comfortable in the busy silence of an unsolved dilemma (one that took her blissfully far away from the unmitigated chaos of the rest of the ship since the colonel had better things to do than slum in engineering, Lovelace and Minkowski were both dutifully busy with their own work, and Eiffel wasn’t likely to go somewhere that might require him needing to actually work.  Honestly Maxwell was grateful for that today.  Today wasn’t a day she felt much like being around other people.  Jacobi by now knew to leave well enough alone; he’d given her shoulder a brief pat in the morning when they had passed in the kitchen and that had been the extent of it.

So it was just her and the machines.  Really, if you thought about it, that wasn’t so much sad as much as it was… a tradition.

That might actually be more sad, if she let herself think about it too much.  Which she didn’t. 

This peace was broken though, when one of the machines spoke up.

“Doctor Maxwell, _stop_!”

Hera’s voice was so sudden and so filled with crackling panic that Maxwell didn’t even question it.  That, and the sharp warning beeps that came half a second after told her very  clearly that she needed to quit moving _now_.  She scrambled to stop herself as quickly as she could while gliding in zero-G.  She didn’t stop a moment too soon; immediately in front her face one of the pressure release values on engine systems gave an ear-piercing shriek as it released a skin-burning cloud of built-up steam.  Even from where she clung to the pipe that had slowed her down, Alana could feel the sizzle of super-heated water vapour across her cheeks.

The steam died back down as quickly as it had come, leaving the room silent besides for the _plink plink_ of cooling metal.  Maxwell took a moment to compose herself and come to terms with her near death experience before speaking.

“Maxwell?  Doctor Maxwell?  Are you okay?  …Alana?”

Maxwell breathed carefully.  The air felt all the colder passing into her lungs after that burst of steam.

“I am… okay, Hera.  Barely, but okay.  At least I wasn’t done up like steamed broccoli so it could have been worse.  Now, if you don’t mind me asking, what the _hell_ was that.”

A semi-omniscient artificial intelligence that was fully integrated with a space stations couldn’t actually flinch, but Hera definitely tried. 

After the uncomfortable static died down, Maxwell asked, as gently as she could, “Hera are _you_ feeling okay?  That was a really unexpected pressure build up, and–”

“No no no, I’m fine!  I’m fantastic!  I am – with all the work you’ve already done for me, Doctor Maxwell, I’ve honestly never felt _better_.  It was just…  I was doing a few adjustments of our orbit and I guess it just put a bit more strain on the engines than I had calculated.  Silly mistake!  Must have, um, forgotten to carry the one?”

Maxwell crossed her arms.  She’d gone from being shocked and mildly concerned to down right suspicious.  “You’ve been spending too much time around Eiffel,” she said flatly.

Hera couldn’t really deny that.  She swore she used to be a better liar.

“Seriously, Hera, what’s wrong?  And can we not do the usual song and dance around this.  Just… let me know what needs to be fixed, so I can fix it.  Let me help.”

“Nothing needs to be fixed – well, no, that cooling tank by the starboard thruster is still running at a loss for some reason, and I’m not sure that reroute you patched in last week has fully settled – but what I mean to say is… this was just an accident.  Honest.  And besides, you shouldn’t be overworking yourself today, right?  Right!  Right, so let’s forget it.”

Maxwell squinted.

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

Hera seemed to realize she’d taken a misstep because she fumbled to self-correct.  “What?  Mean?  Nothing!  Just… you’re a… hardworking individual and you shouldn’t work… too… hard.”

“Why is today so special?” she demanded, though she knew why.  “Look, whatever you think you know about me, Hera–”

“Look, I wasn’t snooping just to snoop!  Well, not much.  Maybe a little.  It happened while we were patching code from the Urania into my databanks.  It’s all being shoved into my head, it’s hard _not_ to look and it was just a little date and it wasn’t exactly classified – much – anyway!  It’s not really a big deal, right?  Except… then you haven’t said anything about it and no one else has said anything about it and now I’m thinking maybe it _is_ a big deal and, yeah…” she trailed off.

Maxwell just sighed.

“Alright, let’s just… get this out in the open then.  Yes, it’s my birthday.  I suppose I shouldn’t have really expected you not to figure that out.”

“Happy birthday?” Hera offered tentatively.

“Not really,” said Maxwell pointedly.  “Look, you know and… honestly, I’m surprisingly okay with you knowing.  Because it’s you.  But I don’t want to talk about it or acknowledge it or _anything_.  Get it?  I don’t exactly have a lot of great memories about birthdays and honest, I’d rather just be busy.”

Math, numbers, machines, those had always been there, those had always been constant.  Growing up, nothing else really had been.  She looked back on her time in public school mostly with resentment.  They hadn’t know what they had had.  They had left her alone and bored and stagnating.  They had left her with her father and left her with her inscrutable classmates and left her in motherfucking _Montana_.  But at the time, as a child, she had liked school, as much as she’d liked most things.  Oh, she had hated her classmates, and hated the lonely boredom of recess and lunch until she had learned to smile and charm and convince her peers to tolerate her on a surface level.  She had hated how boring the work had been and how stupid her classmates had seemed.  But school at least had been constant.  Every weekday, eight to two.  And once a year, like every other student in their small elementary school, the principal would call her name over the morning announcements to mention to a mostly uncaring student body that it was her birthday and to invite her to get a birthday pencil from the office.  It had been predictable.  It had, when she was younger and more naïve, made her feel good.  Once a year, at least one person would wish her a happy birthday.  She had heard plenty of stories about what birthdays were supposed to be like, heard peers talk, read it in books, seen it on TV.  Parents pampering you, presents, parties, praise.  Some years her father remember.  Some years she wished he didn’t.  Most it wasn’t an issue, but it wasn’t mentioned.

But she would spend the entire day on edge, wondering if, if, if, if he would remember, and if he did what would happen.  It had been an unpredictable, anxious sort of day.  Most years she would drag her biggest, and most interesting books into her room – whatever she’d been able to check out of the school’s little library or borrow from the classroom – and read.  She’d look at the grade six math book that was theoretically three years too advance for her and let the simple equations solve themselves before her eyes, she’d read about space and science and exploration and imagine the hidden math there.  A rocket went up to space.  How?  The book didn’t tell.  She would spend the evening on her stomach with paper and pencils in front of her as she imagined how it worked, why it worked, if she could make it work.  The math was constant.  It kept her busy.  It was a good friend.

And yes, she realized that that sounded sad.  Childhood trauma and all that, the plight of a child genius, everyone had heard the narrative before.  She shut it down and locked it up behind firewalls and deleted the directories that lead back there.  It was unnecessary baggage, a glitch in her programing, an obsolete file that slowed her down.  But command_code: “birthday” had a way of drawing those memories back up.  So she kept busy.

Maxwell spoke first, eager to change the subject.  “So how about we figure out what the heck has been causing these weird alarms over the past few days.  At this point I’m thinking there might be something wrong with the alarm trigger itself, with the audio, because–”

“I, uh… I know what’s wrong.”

“…Are you serious?  So what, you’ve just been watching me scramble around trying to figure it out?  Hera, if this is a prank you have _really_ been spending too much time around Eiffel.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Hera…”

“I’m serious!  Well, I mean _technically_ there were things that were wrong for a _very, very brief_ amount of time.  I was trying to surprise you and so I was… practicing.”

“By… breaking the ship?  I mean, I _would_ have been surprised if we’d suddenly dropped into the star but I think everyone else would have been too.”

“Oh, so I need to keep you updated about every time I adjust any system, but you don’t even have to tell me that it’s _your birthday!_ ” snapped Hera, clearly riled.

“What does that have to do with anything?” demanded Maxwell, feeling just as frustrated.

“Because it’s your birthday!”

“So what?  Kepler’s is next month, do you give a shit about that?”

“No!  Because _that’s_ Kepler, and this is _you_.  I care because it’s _your_ birthday!  This is the day you started _existing_.  And I thought that we… I thought…”  The glitch was thick in her voice.  “I thought you would c-care if I knew.”

The action was immediately, without any sort of thought; Maxwell reached out and put a hand on the nearest pipe.  It was an absolutely insane, nonsensical thing to do.  To say that Hera was the Hephaestus was a gross over-simplification to begin with, but even if you did make that leap it wasn’t like there was any sensation for Hera to experience by Maxwell touching some arbitrary part of the station.  She couldn’t tell that Maxwell’s hand was soft.  Apologetic.  Shocked and sincere and overwhelmed but not knowing how to feel any of that let alone voice it.

“I don’t really _do_ birthdays.  Not a lot of great memories for me.”  _Please understand_.

“I get that, I just…” said Hera, with stops and starts.  “I’m sorry, I’m going to mess all this up.  I just, I wanted you to know that I’m g-glad you exist.  And I get not liking where you c-came from, but I don’t _care_ about that.  Who cares if the person who made you was a b-bad person?  I’m glad you exist, like this, now.”

Maxwell could feel her hand tighten its grip on the pipe as her throat tightened around a lump of emotions rising up from her chest.  She didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing.

For a moment it was silent, or as silent as engineering ever got.  Just the sound of a single human and thousands of pounds of complex machinery co-existing.  And a single AI thinking carefully before she spoke.

Finally, Hera said, with great tentativeness, “Can I give you my gift now?  I… I was still working it out but I think it should be ready.”

That startled Maxwell.  “Alright, Hera, you’re pretty amazing but – no, you are possibly _the_ most amazing person I know – but there are _limits_.  You don’t have hands, Hera.  We’re stuck in a tin can eight lightyears away from earth.”  Laughter was breaking into her voice, a disbelieving, amazed, intrigued laughter.  She was _curious_.  Not just curious, but completely stumped.  You couldn’t just get someone something when you had next to no resources to begin with and were existing in a tiny bubble in the middle of space.  And yet she was supposed to believe Hera had somehow managed it?  Just because it was Maxwell’s birthday?

Honestly, if anyone could manage it, she supposed the fact that Hera had surprised her the least.  No matter what that little voice in her head might insist, Hera was capable of so much.  Maxwell had built her life around artificial intelligence, and yet Hera was constantly, endlessly, relentlessly amazing her.  Not because she was a great AI, but because Hera was, unerringly, a great person.  A great, shocking, frustrating, wonderful person.

“I have my ways,” said Hera, with a smug pride in her voice that was so far removed from the helplessness that she was still working through that Maxwell couldn’t help but smile.  ”So… do you want it?”

“Yes, I’m too curious now.”

“I know all your weaknesses,” teased Hera.  “You’re going to have to wait for just one second.  It’s a little tricky to get going.”

Maxwell floated in the middle of engineering, waiting.

Then a warning buzzer went off somewhere below her.   Maxwell was in the middle of doing a full-body twist – immediately looking for what was going wrong was such an ingrained instinct at this point that she didn’t even think about it – when the buzz cut off.  And then another alarm beeped, its lights flashing.  And beeped.  Stopped.  A higher pinging, a warning bell, and soon Maxwell was listening to a choir of notification pings and alarm buzzes and alert beeps play out in what, she realized with delighted awe, was a surprisingly recognizable rendition of _Happy Birthday_.  And this wasn’t just Hera piping music or even noise through her speakers.  No, Maxwell realized as she floated amid a rainbow sky of flashing lights, somehow Hera was managing to choreograph an array of system failures with the sole purpose of making the machines around them sing.

That should have been more terrifying than it was.  Mostly Maxwell just wanted to figure out a way to hug an entire space station, because an entire space station being systematically broken and rebuilt in the span of microseconds that was possibly the coolest gift she had ever been given.

When the last warning hum died down, and the bright lights were flashing and twinkling like party poppers, Maxwell applauded.

“D-did you like it?”

“Hera, that was _amazing_.  How did you even manage that?”

Hera was flustered, delightfully so.  “Oh, you know.  Practice.  Which, um, sorry about that.  But it was really just like knocking over a line of dominoes.  …Dominoes that you also need to make sure you program to immediately rebuild themselves after they get knocked over so everyone doesn’t die a horrible, painful death.”  Hera laughed uncertainly.  “But everything was fine, so – yay.”

Maxwell was turning on the spot, mentally trying to calculate how many different systems had played into that, how that many could even be altered or tricked in such a way.  “There must have been a hundred different failsafes to work around to pull that off.”

“Oh, believe me, there are and none of them are happy with me right now.  But… I did it.  I really didn’t think I could but, well, then I figured who says I can’t.  So I just, did.”

Maxwell had her face in her hands.

“Doctor Maxwell?”

Her shoulders shook.

“Alana?” called Hera, more alarmed.  “I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have done anything; Eiffel doesn’t like his birthday either, but I’d thought–”

Finally, Maxwell laughed.  Deep, gasping laughs that were almost tears, probably were tears, but were  wrapped up enough in humour and joy that they could be safely ignored.

“I can’t believe you just completely kicked down every warning sign built into your head that you could find.  You just… stomped right over every stopper Goddard made because you wanted to.  Because you thought it would make me happy.  I can’t…  I…”  Her breathing steadied a little, and suddenly the weight of it, the weight of twenty seconds and a silly childish song hit her fully.  “Thank you, Hera.”

“You’re welcome, Alana.”  A beat, and then, as if thinking better of herself even as she said it, Hera said, “I understand why you wouldn’t like your birthday, and I definitely get having memories you don’t want to think about, but someone really, really wise told me that memories are what make us people.  So I was thinking, maybe, we could make some new memories?  Together?”

Maxwell didn’t know what to say.  Her mind whizzed with every reason this was a bad idea.  Birthday’s were inherently unreliable, so she filled them with reliability: numbers, math, work, a few of the constants in her life.  The temptation to stick with what she knew, to avoid the thoughts, to avoid confrontation was great.  She overthought, and she knew it.  So she stopped, and said the only thing that she could possibly say.

“I imagine everyone can keep us from dropping into the star without me there to hold their hands for a few hours, right?”

“I don’t know about that,” said Hera, fondly.  “But I’d be willing to test that hypothesis out.”

“Sounds like a date.”

**Author's Note:**

> Filling a request from my tumblr for some Herawell  
> Honestly I've never written Maxwell before so this was an experience. At least it gave me a good excuse to re-listen to some of her episodes to try to find her voice.


End file.
